Work Management Primitives

Definition

Work-management primitives are the concrete objects through which an agent harness represents pending, active, reviewed, and completed work. Good primitives make retries and handoffs routine. Bad ones turn every resumption into archaeology.

Generic lifecycle

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Pending
    Pending --> Claimed
    Claimed --> Active
    Active --> Review
    Review --> Completed
    Review --> Active: failed gate
    Active --> Blocked
    Blocked --> Claimed: resumed
    Active --> Handoff
    Handoff --> Claimed: reassigned
    Completed --> [*]

Gas Town family

The richest vocabulary in the source set comes from gas-town: beads, epics, molecules, protomolecules, formulas, and wisps. These objects encode hierarchy, workflow composition, and persistence. Gas City then generalizes them into a more modular coordination kit.

Anthropic family

Anthropic’s feature lists, init scripts, and progress logs are much simpler primitives, but simplicity is the point. A large JSON checklist with explicit pass/fail state avoids the soft deceit of freeform notes and gives later agents a recoverable truth source.

Operational lesson

The right primitive is the one that survives interruption and guides the next action. In that respect, a dull feature_list.json can beat a flamboyant swarm if the former actually causes the next session to test the right thing. The same logic applies when work becomes scheduled or unattended: the primitive still needs a clear owner, cadence, and review destination, which is where automation-and-background-work enters the picture. The next formal question is whether these primitives should be modeled as serial lists at all, or as the richer dependency objects discussed in partial-order-trace-semantics.

Learnable workflow objects

Recent systems increasingly treat the workflow artifact itself as mutable. self-evolving-workflows names the point where a work primitive stops being only a record of coordination and becomes a learned procedural asset. memento-skills does this through evolving skill packages, while gas-city-but-its-just-codex is beginning to do it through versioned formula families and explicit selection policy.

Related pages

Work primitives are where memory-persistence meets orchestration. See automation-and-background-work, gas-town, gas-city, and claude-code, then compare approaches in harness-architecture-comparison. The newest pressure here comes from self-evolving-workflows.